This is my final post, for now, on the Town of Vienna proposed pool/gym complex. I assume readers know this is about a roughly 30,000 square foot municipal gym (indoor pool, weight room, and other facilities) that the Town of Vienna, VA is considering building, at a construction cost (including land) of about $33M.
In addition, ongoing annual operating costs will be covered by a combination of user fees (for Town residents as well as others), and taxes.
Here, I’m trying to tell the story as I think it should have been told in the first place, starting with what Town Council decided in 2014, the last time a Town of Vienna municipal pool was discussed.
Update 11/11/2024: Minor addendum added to end of post.
Update 11/13/2024 to drive home the point that the revenue (and hence, tax-financed annual deficit) projections for this facility simply ignore all competition for the gym/pool dollar in this area. In so doing, Town Staff’s presentation literally ignores the fundamental reason that Town Council turned down a Vienna pool in 2014.
Question: Didn’t the Town of Vienna go through this “let’s build a pool” discussion just a few years ago?
Answer: Yes. The 2014 Vienna Town Council turned down a proposal to add a pool to the roughly $15M expansion of the gym and other facilities in the Vienna Community Center.
Question: Why was a tax-financed Vienna pool/gym turned down in 2014?
Answer: Based on news reporting at the time (Brian Trompeter, 2014 insidenova.com):
Per Council Member Polychrones, we already had three government-run pool/gym complexes nearby. These are the large Fairfax County REC Centers, located about 10, 12, and 14 minutes’ drive from Town Hall.
Per Council Member Kelleher, a Vienna facility would be inefficiently small, compared to the scale of operations of the Fairfax REC Centers. It would have high average cost per user, due to its small size, and would not be competitive with the Fairfax facilities.
The Mayor at that time characterized a pool as as a want, not a need, and was unwilling to burden future Town Councils with the significant additional debt required to build a pool.
Was a summary of the 2014 Town Council decision and rationale provided to 2024 Town Council?
Answer: No. Not as far as I have been able to tell. I can now claim to have looked at all the publicly-available documents posted for the Town Council 9/30/2024 work session on this topic. I have yet to see a reference to the 2014 Vienna Town Council decision.
In other words, as far as the presented materials go (Town of Vienna, “Annex Reimagined” web page), the current discussion started with “what to do with this Annex property”. The 2014 Vienna pool effort does not appear to be mentioned.
Added 11/13/2024: Question: How does this new proposal address the fundamental economic problems raised in the 2014 Town Council “No” vote?
Answer: It doesn’t. It simply ignores them, and removes all* mention of the Fairfax County REC Centers from the proposal.
* I see there is one list, in one document, showing examples of pools that currently exist across Fairfax County, that does indeed mention two REC centers, one nearby, one at the other side of the county. So “all” is an exaggeration. But the point is, there’s no discussion of the relevance of having three REC centers with pools located within easy driving distance of the proposed new Vienna pool.
The proposal a) does not discuss the local competition for the gym/pool dollar, b) shows a “market area” map that omits the three large Fairfax County REC Centers that are direct competitors to the Vienna facility in this exact market of government-run gym/pool complexes, c) shows estimate of the annual taxpayer-funded losses for this facility under the assumption that there is literally no competition in its core market area of the Town of Vienna, and d) contains just one ambiguously-worded line, on one slide, that maybe lets the informed reader understand that.
Recall that the main reason for the 2014 Town Council’s “no” vote was the presence of the three large nearby Fairfax County REC Centers that already offer gym/pool recreation opportunities.
Below is the market area for the proposed Vienna facility, as shown to Town Council, from the Town’s consultant’s report. Note that there is no mention of the Fairfax County REC Centers.
Source: Presentation posted with the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session.
Here’s the same map, where I have added the locations of the three large Fairfax County gym/pool complexes (REC Centers). These are 10, 12, and 14 minutes’ drive from Town Hall. This map was NOT shown to Town Council:
Source: Presentation posted with the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session. Annotations in red are mine.
Below is the single mention, that I could find, in the entire set of documents presented to Town Council on 9/30/2024, hinting that the projected demand for this facility assumes that it faces no direct competition:
Source: Presentation posted with the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session.
Question: What has changed since that 2014 decision that would allow the current Town Council to ignore a fundamental objection raised by 2014 Town Council?
Answer: Nothing about the fundamental objections raised in 2014 changed. The REC Centers are still operating, along with all the other pool/gym options in this area.
However:
But now, the Town finds itself the owner of a three acre property it bought and used as a temporary police station, during construction of the new police station. And, apparently, the Town may have an increased willingness to take on more debt and higher meals taxes than it did ten years ago.
In 2020, the Town of Vienna floated the largest bond issue in its history. The proceeds were used (I believe) in part to pay off the cost overrun on the recently-expanded community center, mainly to build the new police station that’s about three times the size of the prior one, and also to buy the tract of land formerly occupied by Faith Baptist Church.
(But, credit where credit is due, the Town’s Director of Finance had a perfect sense of timing. I looked at that bond issue in some detail, a few years back, and I believe that the week the Town issued those bonds, municipal bond interest rates hit their all-time lows since at least the time of the Great Depression. And have gone up since. So, if you’re going to borrow a ton of money, it’s a plus to borrow at the lowest municipal bond interest rates in my lifetime.)
The Town used the former Baptist church, and its parking lot, as the temporary police headquarters during the construction of the new Police Station building. Now that the new police station is finished, the Town has torn down all the old church buildings. Currently, it’s an empty unused plot with a parking lot on one side.
The Town still owns three acres that church/temporary police station sat on. This is the property that Town Staff refer to now as “The Annex”.
Where?
On Park Center Street, downtown, just up from Town Hall. The former Faith Baptist Church/Town of Vienna Temporary Police Station property is across the street from, and a bit catty-corner to, the ball fields downtown.
Question: What has been proposed for this new indoor pool/gym?
Answer: This is best described as a one-third-size version of a Fairfax County REC Center.
It’s a gym, that is, it’s a place where people go to exercise indoors. The main features of this gym include an indoor pool, a weight room for resistance training (weight machines) and cardio (treadmills, exercise bikes, etc.), plus (e.g.) empty rooms for exercise classes, stretching, free weights, and so on.
Based on the materials presented at the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session, the building would be about 30,000 square feet. The Town now says 25,000. I don’t know why, The pool water area is 5,500 square feet. I think the proposed weight room (or maybe weight/cardio) was about 4,000 square feet. And the rest of the building would be smaller spaces such as exercise classrooms, ball courts, and similar.
In terms of the physical building, other than the smaller size and more limited range of exercise options, a difference between the Town of Vienna proposal and a Fairfax REC Center is that the Town’s proposal includes a modest water slide, separated from the main pool.
If you are confused about what, exactly, this proposed gym/pool structure is, that may be because the Town continues to emphasize the potential “fun” and “community” aspects of the indoor pool, for kids. And in addition, the Town also espouses the benefits of a pool for exercise. In effect, billing this pool as something for everybody.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, it is unusual for an indoor open rectangular gym pool (i.e., not a Great-Wolf-Lodge amusement-park-style pool), to be used as “fun” pool to any significant extent. My experience with the Fairfax REC Centers is that, in practice, the pools are used (almost?) exclusively for scheduled exercise, things like lap swimming, group swim lessons, and water aerobics for the elderly. Vienna, by contrast, insists that their much smaller proposed indoor gym pool will be both an “exercise” pool, and a “fun” (that is, un-structured open-swim) pool. If true, that would make the Vienna pool significantly different from the exercise-centric pools at the three local Fairfax County REC Centers.
Some of the remaining areas in the gym will be adult-use only. In particular, every gym I’ve ever used has barred children (under 13, say) from the weight/cardio room due to safety concerns. (If nothing else, there are a lot of bad pinch points in a weight room of any sort.)
Question: Is this facility going to be free to use?
Answer: No. The Town’s proposal shows a roughly $1000/year family membership fee. That’s similar to the fees charges by Fairfax County and others (Herndon, Reston) for similar public gym facilities.
From the proposal presented to Town Council 9/30/2024, available as a .pdf, Appendex C, from the Town of Vienna “Annex Reimagined” web page.
Importantly, the revenues from those user fees are integral to the financial projections for the facility — the estimate of what taxpayers will have to pay yearly to keep it going. The Town may not yet have made its final dollar-price decision, but significant user fee revenue is NOT optional for the current proposal. To be clear, nobody is recommending or suggesting that this pool be free to use. It’s just that the Town somehow keeps forgetting to mention that, in its public-facing information.
As of 11/9/2024, the Town’s web page devoted to this topic (“Annex Reimagined”) makes no mention of user fees. Those fees were also absent from a Town mass mailing sent to citizens last month.
Question: Didn’t the Town just finish expanding its tax-financed indoor gym space?
Answer: Yes and no. As part of the expansion of the existing Vienna Community Center, finished in September 2017, that existing Community Center now hosts the following indoor exercise opportunities, per the Town of Vienna website.
- full-size, high school-regulation basketball court with six hoops
- volleyball courts
- three pickleball courts
- single-lane track circling the court
- additional basketball court with two hoops
- two pickleball courts
- volleyball courts
(The duplications are verbatim, from the Town’s website, because the Town tracks its facilities separately for each of the sub-sections of the Community Center complex.)
But that expanded collection of indoor exercise opportunities has gaps, relative to how people use indoor exercise space: Pool and weights. The main new indoor exercise opportunities that this proposed new facility would add are indoor swimming and weight-lifting (resistance training).
So the Town is, in effect, adding to the variety and overall size of the indoor recreation spaces that it offers, using a new building, located about 1000′ from the existing one.
Question: Is this proposed new facility part of the Vienna Parks Master Plan?
Answer: No, Vienna does not yet have a Parks Master Plan. That should be delivered Spring 2025. That’s what it says on the website. (Reference.)
That said, I judge that the presence or absence of a Town Parks Master Plan has no practical importance here. FWIW.
With regard to starting Vienna down this path, just months before the forthcoming Parks Master Plan, do not be alarmed, as Vienna routinely works by the ready-fire-aim method. Likely, if Town Council OKs starting down this path, … then the forthcoming master plan will, indeed, tell you that your plan was always to go down this path. And thus you may claim, going forward, that you have no choice but to continue down this path. Because it’s in the Parks Master Plan. (This may seem Kafka-esque, to some, perhaps even Machiavellian, Perhaps Orwellian?) But in the TOV, it’s just the way some things are done. Sometimes.
At the minimum, right now there is no Town of Vienna Parks master plan, and until one is approved, Town Council can do as it pleases in this area.
Question: Why raise the meals tax for a decade?
Answer: Vienna already has taken on about as much debt as it can finance under current tax rates. To take on the roughly $26M-ish in additional debt this new building would require, they need to raise taxes to be able to cover all the interest and principal payments on total Town debt.
Vienna is pledged to use the meals tax for debt service, and the presence of that stable, dedicated tax base is one of the factors allowing the Town to borrow cheaply. So sayeth the Town. But, the historically large Town of Vienna 2020 bond issue effectively used up all the available meals tax money.
As things stood after the 2020 bond issue, with no new tax revenues, the Town would have been unable to take on significant new debt until it paid down a considerable fraction of existing debt. This is why the Town has told the citizens that the options are to raise the meals tax now, or wait a decade. A decade being the time it would take to pay down, in essence, a chunk of that big 2020 bond issue, and prior bond issues.
A second factor, not mentioned by the Town, is that Virginia law was recently amended to make it much easier to raise meals taxes. It is widely anticipated that Fairfax County will impose a meals tax soon (reference). (Prior law required Fairfax to have a referendum on the issue, and voters consistently voted “no” to a meals tax in Fairfax County.) The anticipated Fairfax County meals tax will raise diners’ costs outside of the Town of Vienna, and so will reduce the anti-competitive aspects of increasing diners’ costs within the Town of Vienna.
Extras for Experts 1: Did the People of Vienna really ask for a $1000/year membership indoor gym and small indoor pool? That seems like a pretty specific ask, if you ask me.
Answer: Not as such. And digging any deeper below that would require a lot of effort, and likely require the cooperation of the Town.
Last year, the Town widely advertised the presence of an on-line survey regarding possible uses of this Annex property, with an emphasis on recreational uses. They got more than 1000 responses, mostly (but not entirely) residents of the Town of Vienna.
Reading through the contractor’s report, it’s clear that there was significant interest in an exercise- or sports-related use, in the respondent population, as it responded to this survey, as structured. (For example, “sell the land” was not, I think, offered as an explicit option on the survey. My write-in vote was for a community fallout shelter, but I suspect that was not given serious consideration.)
Beyond that, I don’t find a lot of clarity in the contractor’s report, so I suspect that there was some degree of “discussion and interpretation” of the results, before arriving at a final summary. Just as an example, at least some charts make it appear that pickleball courts were the single most-preferred option. So in some sense, as compiled by the contractor, an indoor pool edged out pickleball courts.
Source: From the Town of Vienna Website, “Annex Reimagined“, Use study final report.
My only conclusion is that “this is exactly what The People want” is Not Warranted by the Data presently available. This proposed pool/gym is probably among the things that people might have wanted, assuming no consideration was given to the cost (or user fees). But it’s not as if Town residents voted on a list of options, and a small-scale REC Center at the proposed annual user fee beat the two or three other feasible options on the ballot.
In summary: Yes, a significant number of people said “pool”, in some form. No, it’s not clear what they had in mind. Nor that they gave any consideration to the $1K/year user fee. And pool seems to have edged out, of all things, pickleball courts.
Extras for Experts 2: What do we already have for pools and gyms in the Vienna VA area?
1: Fairfax County REC Centers
Fairfax County runs three very large REC Centers near the Town of Vienna. These all have a big indoor pool, weight room, and various other exercise-related amenities (e.g., basketball court, exercise classroom, … ). An annual family membership with access to all those facilities runs about $1050. (There are additional fees for some services, such as golf, or renting the handball courts by the hour.)
A further difference between the REC Centers and the proposed Vienna facility is that the REC Centers are fully self-supporting (in the sense that, by statute, user fees must cover operating costs). By contrast, annual operating costs for the Vienna facility will be covered in part by general tax revenues.
Finally, as a long-time user, I will attest that these Fairfax-run facilities are really nice places to work out. (Though, as befits a public facility, not luxury. No towel service here.) They are not just competitors to a Vienna facility, they are attractive competitors.
Sub-question: Why does the presence of the nearby Fairfax County REC Centers matter?
Answer:
1) It means that Town Council was shown a lowball estimate of the ongoing taxpayer cost of running this facility. That, because the contractor’s revenue projections for a Vienna pool/gym assumed there was no competition for the pool-related spending of residents of the Town of Vienna proper.
2) The three nearby government-run pool/gym fitness centers weaken any argument that there is a strong need for similar, and similarly-priced, Vienna facility.
3) To the extent that the new Vienna pool/gym cannibalizes membership from the three nearby Fairfax County REC Centers, that raises the average cost per user, for government-sponsored exercise in this area, with no additional exercise achieved.
The proposed Vienna facility is essentially identical to a Fairfax REC Center, charging about what Fairfax charges now (for access to to the entire REC Center network), but with a gym/pool that’s about a third the size of the typical Fairfax REC Center. (In fact, for non-Town residents, the proposed fee to use the Vienna facility is higher than that charged for the REC Centers.)
Viewed purely as “a place to exercise”, it should be clear that these facilities share the same customer base. (And that, to some extent, these facilities are vying for the same customer base as the numerous private gyms and pools in this area.)
The first implication of the three nearby REC Centers is that we are in no sense “under-served”. Anyone who wanted to join a government run gym/pool, similar to the proposed Vienna facility, for about the same price as the Vienna facility, just a short drive away, has had the opportunity to do so for decades now. (E.g, the Oakmont REC Center was built in 1988).
But, as then-Council Member Kelleher pointed out ten years ago, the small size of the Vienna facility means it will have a higher cost per user than the Fairfax REC Centers. To the extent that the Vienna facility draws members away from the REC Centers, all that does is raise the average cost of publicly-sponsored indoor exercise in the area.
Finally, as I laid out in my original post in this series, the Town was shown financial projections based on there being literally no other government gyms in the area. Ignoring the copious amounts of competition for the local exercise dollar means that the Town was shown the rosiest possible scenario for the likely ongoing tax-paid financial deficit for this facility. The estimates put in front of Town Council likely significantly understate taxpayer liabilities to keep this gym/pool running in the future, because they ignore all local competition for the gym/pool dollar.
It’s actually quite a bit worse than that bland statement.
First, the consultants propose annual membership fees for non-Town-residents that are about 20% higher than the current REC Center fees. And yet, they projected that half the members for this new facility will come from outside of the Town of Vienna. This half includes individuals who live closer to a REC Center than they will to the proposed Vienna facility. So, embedded in the consultant’s cost estimates is an assumption that some significant fraction of community residents will drive farther, and pay more, to use the Vienna facility instead of the larger Fairfax REC Centers.
Second, if you follow through the logic of the “economies of scale:” point raised by Council Member Kelleher, back in 2014, you eventually realize that Vienna does not have the option to recover its costs through fees alone. This will be a taxpayer-subsidized facility for as long as it operates.
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- Fairfax County REC Centers will cost less to operate, per user, than the Vienna facility, owing to the much larger scale of the REC Center facilities.
- Fairfax sets its membership rates to cover its costs.
- Practically speaking, Vienna really won’t have the option to charge significantly more than the nearby Fairfax REC Centers.
- And so, logically, the proposed Vienna facility’s membership rates are effectively capped below the level of costs it will incur. Vienna will never be able to charge enough to cover the operating costs of this facility, given the presence of three very large County facilities nearby, priced at their lower per-member cost.
2: Local swim clubs (private membership outdoor pools).
I count four private membership pools as being in, or in the neighborhood of, Vienna VA, as shown above. Combined membership is 2450 families or so, but that’s out of a population larger than just the (roughly) 5200 households in the Town of Vienna. (And it’s not clear where the boundary is — apparently a fair number of Town of Vienna residents belong to the Mosby Woods pool.) All of these local private pools are physically larger than the 5,500 square foot indoor pool that has been proposed for Vienna.
These swim clubs turn out to be odd relics of a bygone era. They aren’t for-profit businesses. They are organized as non-profit tax-exempt social clubs, per IRS regulations. This allows them to skate through certain tax and zoning regulations, and so allows them to locate and remain in the local neighborhoods (on land zoned for residential use), where no for-profit business would be allowed to exist.
But the downside of that form of organization is that these swim clubs are more-or-less “frozen” in the state in which they existed when they were formed in the 1960s. They can’t even raise their prices enough to clear the waiting lists (below). (Because? They are non-profits. Why are they all nonprofits? Because if they weren’t, they couldn’t be there (zoning).
As shown above, they have a combined waiting list of about 2,200 names. Extent of duplication across lists is unknown. But suspected to be high.
The marketplace will never make those waiting lists materially shorter. That’s gist of my prior analysis of this topic. At today’s land prices and with local land mostly built out, it is unlikely that any new community membership pool could be formed. (Plus, there hasn’t been a new one built in this area in more than a half-century.) And, as noted in prior posts, as not-for-profits, and tax exempt, all the existing pools would gain, for any attempt to accommodate additional membership, is heartache.
Most of our community private membership pools (swim clubs) started up on the era of desegregation. That’s not germane to how they currently operate. But it’s undeniably true, as a historical fact. (For reference, Lake Fairfax (then privately owned) was desegregated via lawsuit in 1965.)
More than anything else, the long waiting lists for Vienna-area private membership outdoor pools (swim clubs) show that there is demand for membership in an outdoor private pool, at around $1K/family/year. Ish. What I would characterize as a “predominantly fun” pool. (As opposed to a “predominantly exercise” pool typically found in a gym.) Whether that would translate to demand for membership in a small indoor pool, or to any type of government-run (public) pool, I have no clue.
Finally, in the context of these local swim clubs, I’ll restate my observation that that pools meant for exercise are just different beasts from pools meant for fun. Not that my pool, and most pools, don’t accommodate some of both. Swim team practices, adult lap swimming, and so on, coexist with unstructured play time. But the primary focus of these outdoor pools — and the majority of the pool time and area of these private pools — seems to be “open swim” periods, which means kids just messing around and having fun at the pool.
By contrast, here’s the actual pool schedule for the pool at the Oakmont REC Center. It should be evident from the daily schedule that “open swim” (kids playing around) is constrained to a tiny fraction of total pool surface/time available.
The lesson here is that all big rectangular pools can accommodate both exercise and play. The key to understanding what kind of pool you are getting is to pin down the fraction of pool time and area devoted to “open swim”, versus the fraction devoted to “lap”-related/”class”-related activities. The graphic above does that nicely, as area of the graphic represents pool surface area x time available. You can see that the “open swim” block accounts for maybe 5 percent of the total pool/area available at Oakmont. To be clear, to say that a pool will have some “open swim” time in no sense guarantees that it will be a “fun-centered” pool, Oakmont REC Center has “open swim”, but it is overwhelming a pool used for serious, scheduled exercise.
3 there are many for-profit gyms in this area.
You can’t ignore the presence of a lot of for-profit gyms in the Vienna area. For sure, some part of the potential demand for a Vienna gym/pool ought to come from those who currently have for-profit gym memberships. But I can’t even guess what the impact would be.
The first issue is the unknown overlap of the market segments for for-profit and publicly-run gyms. For-profit gyms cover a wide range of facilities, targeting different market segments, and offering different levels of amenities. Some of them have pools. Most have weights, unless strictly cardio-oriented. Unlike a publicly-run gym, for-profit gyms are under no mandate to be a one-size-fits-all or something-for-everyone exercise opportunity.
The second issue with assessing the interaction between local for-profits and the proposed government-run Vienna gym/pool is the family-friendly/kid friendly thing. The for-profit gyms I’ve joined in the past did not strike me as particularly kid-friendly. (Further, my recollection is that some of them have a strong “singles” flavor, with all that implies. Not that I would know anything about that personally. But that’s the opposite of the family-friendly vibe that the Town of Vienna is aiming for.)
Nobody will be able to tell you where the local for-profit gyms fit in, for the assessment of a proposed Vienna public pool/gym. But I can at least benchmark a price or two, to see how they compare to the proposed $1K/year family membership for the Vienna pool.
Here’s one that looks nice, Evolution, in downtown Vienna. It has weight machines and cardio machines. Looks exactly like the type of facility I used all my adult life. A year’s membership for my wife and me would cost about $1300 ($55 x 12 x 2). Or maybe 25% more than the County REC Center membership, for a less comprehensive but much closer facility.
Good enough. I’m guessing that the local for-profit gyms are priced in the neighborhood of what the Vienna pool/gym would cost. And that they are a reasonably close substitute for the government-run Vienna gym, for some types of users. Beyond that, I don’t think you can say much.
For-profit gyms are a mixed bunch. Always have been. So are the people who use them. Not much more to say than that.
Extras for Experts 4: Could you fit an Olympic-sized outdoor pool on the Town of Vienna “Annex” (former Faith Baptist Church) property?
Answer, yeah, sure looks like you could.
An Olympic-sized pool is about a third of an acre of water surface. Put that way, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to be able to squeeze one — with all the other associated stuff it needs — onto a three-acre lot.
I made the table and crude graphic above by scaling up the dimensions of Vienna Aquatic Club layout. They have a pool that’s about half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. I.e., double the pool size means double the parking, double the size of the locker rooms, etc.
You’d need to build a parking garage alongside it, if you wanted to put a pool this big on three acres. Crudely put, that’s because your car is bigger than you are. So if the pool is full of people, that’s going to correspond to an area much larger than the pool, full of parked cars. Based on Vienna Aquatic Club, a one-third-acre olympic-sized pool is going to need to park about 200 cars to handle peak-period open-swim demand (e.g., a hot Saturday afternoon), or about an acre-and-a-third of parking. Which means you have to start stacking those cars up in a garage, if you want to fit everything onto a three-acre plot. Or else have little land left over for (e.g.) the pool deck or surround.
And if you ran it like the local private pools — unlimited member access during peak use periods — you’d only be able to sell about 900 family memberships, tops, to an outdoor olympic-sized pool. That reflects the capacity of the pool, for unconstrained peak-period use.
Operating cost is an open question. Whether or not the Town could run an outdoor pool that size for for $0.5M/year (the Vienna Aquatic membership fee, scaled up) is unknown. If so, the memberships would cost about what a Vienna Aquatic Club family membership costs — call it $600. At this level of precision, let me call that not intrinsically different from the membership prices in the Town’s proposal.
As a public provider, the Town would almost certainly have to offer (e.g.) single-day passes and such. Some other ways to buy pool access, other than annual membership. So I’m hazy on how the crowd control would work at peak periods.)
Extras for Experts 5: Some possible justifications for a taxpayer-financed public gym in Vienna.
The Town’s presentation materials are not exactly clear on why this proposed pool/gym is a justifiable use of tax dollars, both to build and to run, other than some general feel-good issues around exercise and community.
Sub-question 1: Does providing a public gym increase the amount of exercise undertaken by well-to-do adults?
Answer: No. Not for a wealthy population with ample existing exercise opportunities.
There’s a fairly large scholarly literature on this topic. I cannot claim to have read it all, but my impression of what I read is the following:
For a poverty population, or for children with limited exercise opportunities, providing free exercise opportunities, in an area with few existing ways to exercise, does, typically, increase the amount of exercise by that poverty population. (And so, humanitarian issues aside, for a population with a high incidence of taxpayer-financed or -subsidized health care coverage, there is an argument to be made that it’s cheaper to build gyms than hospitals.)
Researchers use the term “fitness desert” to describe high-poverty areas lacking fitness or exercise facilities. Opening new, free, facilities in a fitness desert does lead to greater total amounts of exercise.
By contrast, the impact of free public gyms, on middle-class adults with significant existing exercise opportunities, is rarely the subject of research, and when it is, typically finds impacts that are too small to be reliably measured (no “statistically significant” difference).
The bottom line is that the well-to-do, in an area with many opportunities to exercise, will exercise. The presence or absence of some particular exercise opportunity has at best a minor influence on the amount of exercise achieved.
Source: CDC
In other words, to a close approximation, given the high incomes of the Vienna-area population, and the ample existing opportunities for exercise, as I read the scholarly literature on this, most of what a proposed Vienna pool/gym will do is substitute exercise in this facility, for exercise that would have occurred elsewhere.
My take on the research literature on this topic matches my experience. I’m old enough to have used the Bally’s Gym located underneath the Tyson’s Corner mall, and the one at Loehman’s Plaza. For a while I used a little gym located right on Church Street in Vienna. All of those went out of business, and somehow I managed to find a place to exercise anyway. Once I discovered the County REC Centers, I never looked back. But if those REC Centers did not exist, I’d find another way to exercise.
More informally, you know who has a strong interest in a Vienna pool? Families that swim a lot now. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the likely heavy users of a Vienna facility, in the future, are those who exercise regularly now.
Sub-question 2: Does building a pay-for-use public gym in an urban area lead to better health outcomes for the population.
No. Or at least, no hard evidence. See above. Even for the poverty populations where free publicly-provided exercise venues increase the level of exercise, there appear to be no (or, at least, few) studies that go on to measure the impact on the health of the affected population (e.g., reduction in heart attacks per capita, lower prevalence of diabetes, and so on.)
For sure, exercise is associated with better health outcomes. So there’s an assumption that you’ve increase the health status of the population. But any impact that public facilities have, on the average level of exercise in the population, and then on to the health of the population, gets too tenuous to be observed in typical studies of this issue, over the typical time frame studied.
This may be more a case of “absence of evidence, not evidence of absence”. But there’s no hard evidence for it, in either case.
Sub-question 3: Is there a market for a public facility focusing on specialty or under-served populations?
Here I’m thinking both of specialty classes (parent-child classes, gentle exercise programs for the elderly), as well as the small low-income population living in the Vienna area.
The idea that the Town of Vienna would make a major effort to attract and serve a low-income population is simply not credible. So I don’t think one could appeal to “low-income underserved” as a principal rationale for operating a public gym/pool.
And, while most for-profit gyms are oriented toward reasonably fit young and middle-aged adults, we do have private and non-profit gyms in the area offering specialty classes for the elderly and for children.
Several local gyms offer elderly-oriented classes. (E.g., Lifetime Fitness, YMCA, Zumba Gold in various local facilities, and so on). So the idea that the elderly can only obtain structured exercise in government-provided facilities is not true. There appear to be numerous for-profit and non-profit entities that offer elder exercise classes in this area, assuming you can pay the fees. Further, there are local Vienna gyms specializing in fitness for kids, including little kids (e.g., My Gym, Vienna.)
Sub-question 4: What about the “sense of community” argument.
Finally, if there’s no clear objective reason for building a small, tax-subsidized REC-Center-like facility in Vienna, the argument in favor can always be made in terms of “sense of community” and civic pride.
I don’t think there’s any objective way to argue for or against such an argument. So far, despite some searching, I have yet to come across any type of hard evidence that this is a material benefit of public gyms in high-income areas. But it may be all-but-impossible to quantify “sense of community”, and so to measure it.
Can’t rule it out. Can’t prove that it happens, either.
Realistically, the Town can make the argument that, value aside, it’ll be pretty neat to have our own pool, and it likely won’t cost enough that people will notice. And, unfortunately, that seems to be the gist of what I’ve read. The cost of construction will require adding a penny to the cost of a dollar’s worth of restaurant meal. (And, not discussed, may crowd out other capital projects for the next decade or two, as all the current debt gets paid down.)
The Town isn’t talking about the likely annual operating losses (as opposed to those one-time construction costs), to be covered in perpetuity by the taxpayers. But, as someone who as pored over the Town budget from time to time, I am sure that the Town’s bookkeeping system will guarantee that nobody will ever be able to determine the true level of annual losses for this facility, once this is up and running. The Town will take this function of government — pool/gym complex — and commingle its costs and revenues with the rest of the Parks and Rec budget. After which, nobody outside of Town government will have a clue how much it costs to keep this facility running. It’ll just be part of the overall Parks and Rec budget.
In Fairfax County, by contrast, they maintain a separate fund for the REC Centers, and for the Reston Community Center (which has a pool). That way, Fairfax has a reasonably clean set of accounts for those facilities, and can check to see that the REC Centers in fact cover their own operating costs. (You can also see that the roughly 5,000 square foot pool in Reston only covers about 40% of operating costs.)
That level of clarify of local government bookkeeping, by Fairfax County, seems laudable to me, but it would never happen in Vienna. It would require both that Town Council would want that information to be publicly known, for purposes of accountability of elected officials, and would have the foresight to direct that the Town’s books be set up so that costs and revenues for this facility were kept in a separate fund, as Fairfax does for the REC Centers. The likelihood of both those things happening, at the same time, is, in my opinion, effectively zero.
The upshot is that, whatever it costs to run this proposed center, going forward, we’ll pay it, and we’ll have no clue how much it is.
Addendum: Summary of prior posts on this topic.
There’s a lot of research behind this FAQ, shown in prior posts. This addendum lists those, and narrates how this evolved as I read through the materials posted with the Town’s 9/30/2024 Town Council Work Session.
- Post 2037, where I was floored to see that the Town’s consultant’s estimates for likely pool users ignored the presence of any local competition, most notably, the three County REC Centers. My plea in that post is that if the Town wants to know likely use for this new facility, it should at least survey Town residents and ask them a realistic survey question (are you likely to buy $1K/year family membership for the facility as-proposed, are you likely to buy $12/day passes, and so on.) Vienna should spend $1K on a survey to get that information before committing to spending $26M.
- Post 2038, where I did some simple benchmarks for the Town’s consultant’s projections of revenue, and found that, sure enough, they were much higher than you would guess, based on (e.g.) Fairfax County REC Center revenue per square foot of facility.
- Post 2039, where I was frankly pissed off that the Town sent out an “informational” post card that encouraged residents to let the Town Council know how much they liked this idea, but didn’t mention the ~$1000/year user fee that Vienna residents would have to pay. This, while the very first page, of the very first document, in the materials shown to Town Council, in the 9/30/2024 Town Council Work session (link here), listed those user fees. (Only later did I note that, in addition, there is no mention of user fees on the Town’s web page on the Annex. In both cases, Town staff made it appear as if the only financial issue is another penny on the meals tax.)
- Post 2042, where I summarized the information I could find on our other local public pools in this area. That’s the point at which I found out that the similarly-sized pool in Reston only covers about 40% of its operating costs. (Which, I only later found out, is in agreement with 2014 Council Member Kelleher’s statement that a Vienna pool — to be roughly the same size as the Reston pool — would be inefficiently small.)
- Post 2043, Post 2044, where I found out that the proposed pool is quite small. At heart, these two posts are just the same calculation, done two ways. The upshot is that the consultant’s revenue projections assume what appears to me to be a ridiculously high density of annual contracts, per square foot of pool, relative to what our local private membership pools allow. There is no mention in the consultant’s materials (that I noticed) that pool size might limit the number of memberships that could be sold.
- In Post 2045, I stumbled across local newspaper reporting from a decade ago, and found out that the 2014 Town Council was aware of all the big picture issues that I’d spent the last week figuring out. But that the 2024 Town Council had not been briefed in the reasons for the 2014 “no” decision on a Vienna municipal pool.
- Post 2046, I got a lot of surprises when I looked at the local swim clubs, but I finally figured out why we (and all of the DC area) has such ridiculously long waiting lists for those membership pools. Basically, those swim clubs are non-profits, and most are relics of the desegregation era. And they ain’t making any more of them.
- And, finally, this post is where I put it all in one place, in one reasonably coherent story.
